MUSIC REVIEW

MUSIC REVIEW; A Political Backdrop Yields Surprises

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Published: January 20, 2000

The Chamber Music Society's concert at Alice Tully Hall on Tuesday evening was a real ear-opener in terms of repertory, and it included some beautiful performances, not least of Hanns Eisler's highly obscure ''Roman Cantata.''

Everything to be known of this piece -- that it was written in 1937 and set denunciatory prose by an Italian anti-Fascist -- suggested it would be some kind of abrasive exhortation, its force now spent. But not at all. Theodora Hanslowe, singing gorgeously and with superb control, revealed a rapturously lyrical piece lying somewhere between Richard Strauss (whose ''Capriccio'' sextet was included later in the program) and J. S. Bach. Disgust, the principal motive of the text, becomes an occasion for beauty, and the entire four-movement piece is song, with mellow support from clarinets, viola and cello.

Ms. Hanslowe and her colleagues were glorious again in a second Eisler cantata from the same period, ''The Prison House Cantata,'' this one having to do with the jailing of the labor union leader Angelo Herndon in Georgia in the 1930's. If the work seemed less special, the awkward text was probably to blame.

Words of another kind, though, added to the evening. Bruce Adolphe read out a short defense of political music that Eisler had written for a concert in 1932, and did so with admirable conviction. After that, David Randolph came to the platform to recall some charming and funny anecdotes from the time he studied with Eisler in New York, soon after the two cantatas were written. Full evidence was given of the composer's humanity and passion for music, and given again, differently, in the performances.

The concert's second big revelation came at the end, when the Strauss memento was followed by another string sextet, Erwin Schulhoff's. Like Eisler, Schulhoff had to work out what it meant to be a Communist composer, and his fate was harder: he died in a concentration camp in Bavaria in 1942.

His Sextet is a magnificent piece. In the intensity, exertion and acid tang of its fast movements, it sounds a bit like Bartok or Shostakovich, but it dates from the early 1920's, when Shostakovich was still a boy. There was also no model for its most personal feature: its creation of purposeful passages in the corners of which wild things can happen. A kind of frank, urgent statement is bedeviled by a sudden weird solo, or an effect remembered from a quartet by Schoenberg or Webern. Most hair-raising of all are the endings of the slow movement and of the finale, the former with a soft, strange penultimate chord, the latter ebbing away in the depths of the lowest instruments.

The work was finely played. Earlier, Gary Hoffman and David Golub gave a spirited projection of Weill's Cello Sonata. The next concert in the Chamber Music Society's series devoted to music from 1922 to 1945 comes on Sunday afternoon and promises to be just as lively.